Problem Statement

I have recently noticed that my ability to focus on something is strongly limited by my ability to understand it. In practice that means I have little trouble reading books or articles for hours on end, as long as I can follow the contents fairly easily, i.e. there are only one or two inferential steps between my understanding and what the text tries to explain.

If it is more complicated than that I can feel my eyes glaze over and my mind wandering away. It is as if my brain leaps away from the work it would have to do to understand.

That's not acceptable to me and I need to train myself to change that. Over the past few days I have tried to closely observe this behavior to better understand it, and I have come to the conclusion that it is not a natural behavior, but rather one I have conditioned myself into over many years.

See, while I was working on my computer science degree, I had to read through many educational texts written by my professors themselves. And while I'm generally convinced that they were great scientists, most of them were terrible educators and those educational materials were equally bad. However since a bachelors degree in computer science really only covers foundational knowledge that has already been explained and re-explained time and time again, it's easy to find absolutely excellent third party resources that do a much, much better job of explaining than what my professors were able to do. So instead of trying to understand a difficult topic with the help of a terribly written text, it's a much better approach to simply look for additional resources as soon as you get stuck. This saves a lot of time and frustration, without compromising on understanding. I consider this a good heuristic if your goal is to understand the material required for a degree. Unfortunately it is a terrible heuristic if your goal is to become a better scientist, or critical thinker. This strategy only works as long as great resources are so ubiquitous that finding them requires less effort than working through the resource you already have.

Having relied so much on this heuristic, I have trained myself to discard a source as soon as it becomes too complicated (complexity was a great proxy for quality at university) and looking for something else, ideally a Youtube video on that topic. That does not exist for most topics, so I often find myself stuck in an endless loop of looking for better resources, discarding them soon after finding them because of their complexity and never getting anywhere, or alternatively getting sidetracked and watching an engaging video on a completely separate topic, granting my brain a quick dopamine hit, thereby reinforcing this fruitless strategy. Repeat ad nauseam.

On the one hand it's disappointing to know that this is my own fault, but on the other hand this means there's a much greater chance for me to do successfully do something about it.

Proposed Fix

The title wasn't clickbait. As far as I can tell, the single biggest hurdle I need to overcome is the fact that my brain has learned to expect a reward when disengaging from complex material. In the long term, I would like to incentivize my brain to stay engaged, but for now I am content with removing the expectation of a reward, by removing the reward itself.

That means for the next 30 days, instead of switching from a resource I find difficult, to one I find easy, disengaging will be followed by... disengagement. Doing nothing. This isn't supposed to be a punishment. It's an opportunity to stay with my own thoughts, ruminate and even get lost in them. Something I remember fondly from my childhood, but not something I find myself doing often nowadays. It's not a passive, boring nothingness. It's doing nothing as an activity. The fact that this sounds paradoxical is perhaps the biggest indicator that we have lost something of value here.

I will also refrain from consuming any media that is naturally more engaging than written text. Specifically no Youtube. If my brain wants dopamine through media, It has to engage with text. I make no restrictions on the type of literature. Trying to only engage with complex writing sounds like it is either doomed to fail or will result in active resentment of said writing. So if I end up spending a whole lot of time reading mediocre scifi novels, that's fine.

There are some supplementary techniques I intend to apply to make engaging with difficult texts easier. Those are:

• Active Reading & Recall (summarizing, questioning, self-testing)
• Previewing and Chunking (skimming the full text before reading to set expectations and context; reading smaller chunks at a time before stopping and reviewing)
• Interleaving (Mixing Topics to keep sessions engaging and improve flexible thinking)

I call those supplementary techniques, because I don't expect them to meaningfully help with staying engaged, but rather to help with knowledge retention and fatigue.

Expectations

I have outlined my hopes for the results of this experiment above, but I'm genuinely curious as to what will actually happen.

If I frame this in the sense of quitting an addiction, then common advice would be that replacing my behavior with nothing is extremely unlikely to succeed. A replacement behavior (with more favorable properties) is usually needed.

But I'm not convinced that this framing is appropriate. First of all it's not literally an addictive behavior. It might be dopamine seeking, but reading and then switching to an easier medium is not the same as simply wasting time on social media.

And secondly I do believe there is a real difference between passive, boring nothingness, and active nothingness. I'm trying to promote resting and being with my thoughts as an activity in my preferences. I expect this to be a similarly active nothingness as meditation and mindfulness training, which certainly doesn't feel passive, or like a punishment.

So we'll see what happens. In a way this post is like preregistering an experiment, even though the parameters are too loose and the participant group to small to count as a proper experiment, I still want to be bound to document all 30 days of this, regardless of success or failure.

Okay, see you in 30 days!